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[SuperMappy]

The "Video Game Pinoneer or MURDERER?" segment is brilliant.

[RedOktober]

[Firefox]

[SuperMappy]

Murica, baby!

[Firefox]

[Firefox]

[Lurker of Stars]

So, Half-Life is 20 years old. Does anyone here feel really old yet? Also, here's a nice anniversary video feat. that druid 2 remix.

[Istar]

That’s cool.

20 years old - hard to believe every digital byte of it will have disappeared by 2038...

[Firefox]

[RedOktober]

I was always under the impression that Bob Lazar was a big fat liar.

[Firefox]

I was always under the impression that Bob Lazar was a big fat liar.

There's an incredible amount of horseshit surround the UFO topic, but I've always been sort-of halfway convinced by Bob Lazar's story.

I mean, nobody had really even heard the name "Area 51" before he came out with his story, never mind "S-4" to the south where he claims the flying saucer reverse-engineering project was based. Then a couple of years later the Soviet Union crumbled away and a journalist bought best-quality Soviet spy satellite photos of the area, and it was all there exactly as Bob Lazar had described it. (I had a magazine with copies of the photos in it.)

And he talks like it's a real job he had - when people ask him questions he answers instantly and naturally, just like you or I would describe a place we worked at a couple of years ago. He doesn't claim to have met any aliens or even to know how the craft were acquired.

I dunno - maybe it's a load of bollocks, maybe it isn't. I think it's cool someone's finally making a film about it, though.

[KlaxonCow]

Area 51 is a US Air Force base.

It's known that the USAF worked on saucer-shaped aircraft around the 1950s:



The logic of this design is... well, take a cross-section of a typical plane wing:



Now, rotate that cross-section 360 degrees and you can see where the saucer shape comes from. It's basically an aerofoil - a wing - that simultaneously points in all 360 degrees at the same time. A directionless wing. That's what the saucer - the Frisbee shape - basically is.

If you want to change direction in a standard winged plane, then you roll the craft and gradually bank around. The theoretical advantage of the saucer is that, as it effectively "points" in all directions, you just apply thrust towards the direction you want to go. There is no "turning", as there is simply no preferred direction to the saucer shape.

The "avrocar" - pictured above and video below (with perfectly unnecessary creepy music) - is basically a vehicle somewhere between a hovercraft, a helicopter and a plane.



Because, what's interesting about this design, is that, inside the "saucer", you've got something somewhat akin to the rotors of a helicopter, albeit vertically aligned:



So, what you've got with the saucer is a directionless aerofoil, with something akin to helicopter rotors inside it. So you have the VTOL capability of a helicopter - the down thrust which makes the Avrocar in the video above float around like a hovercraft - and, when in motion, the craft's shape itself is effectively a wing.

Thus, you can imagine that as such a vehicle moved forward at speed, it would generate lift - just like a plane's wings - and smoothly transitioned from "helicopter", as it were, to "plane".

Not entirely sure how the thrust would work exactly. But my guess is that as you've got rotors spinning around inside that thing, you could crack open a hole at the "back" and the air, finding an escape, all rushes out of that hole, pushing you forward by Newton's "equal and opposite reaction".

Or, of course, you could strap a more traditional jet engine to it on a turntable / ring on the top side - which the pilot's cockpit can also be attached to - so you can just spin the engine around.

Thus, putting it together, you've got a VTOL aircraft but which can then fire its jet engines and, generating lift, becomes like a plane. But a plane that, by spinning the engine and cockpit around on a top ring, could very rapidly change direction.

If you imagined such a craft in an aerial dog fight with a traditional plane, then it would run rings around it in terms of aerobatics. Traditional planes have to bank to gradually turn around, while this thing can rapidly spin to a new direction, thrust away and it's gone. While you're still turning, the gunner aboard can spin the ring to track you and you're being all shot up.

You can see why the USAF might try to develop such aircraft during the Cold War - because if you could perfect this design, then they could leave them Ruskies in the dust.

The problem is that by all accounts - and you can kind of see it in that "avrocar" footage, which was only a much more modest "hovercraft" version of the idea, moving very slowly and still wobbling like hell - the thing was rather unstable.

As our aerophiles will know, the tail of a plane isn't cosmetic. It helps stabilise and control the craft.

Which might well explain why the USAF later experimented with this variant of the saucer design:



That's much more obviously like a plane that's just got one big saucer-shaped aerofoil "wing". But while the tail and body stabilise it, it is hard to see how this design would really be any advantage over a traditional plane - because you've restored the vehicle having a preferred direction, to get stability, but that somewhat negates the very reason you went with a saucer-shape to begin with.

Therefore, as they stopped bothering with these designs and we don't see anything like this anymore, it just wasn't practical. In theory, it seems like it could make for an awesome aircraft design, but it's unstable and attempts to make it stable loses you any of the advantages you'd have over a traditional plane - so you might as well just make a traditional plane and put your money and efforts into a better jet engine for it.

And one can imagine that its instability might well have cause one of the experimental designs to crash... coming down somewhere over Roswell.

Whilst there's no mystery to Area 51. It's a US Air Force R&D base that's been put in the proverbial middle of nowhere, because that's where they can test these new experimental designs, without anyone much seeing what they're up to.

Because, with such new designs, you kind of don't want your enemies - the Soviets at the time - to know exactly what you're up to, in order to develop their own variants and / or counter-designs, losing you whatever advantage your new designs are supposed to gain over your enemies.

So, when people who'd watched too much sci-fi at the cinema, which was born of Russia putting Sputnik into space and kicking off "the Space Race", decided that the odd-looking flying saucers must be invading space aliens, the USAF and American government were perfectly happy not to remotely disabuse them of these daft ideas.

Indeed, it would suit their purposes to totally muddy the waters. Call it "a weather balloon". Because that's obviously not what it was and the conspiracy theorists would invent some weird narrative about space aliens and autopsies and shit like that.

Good. Because then the Russians, watching all this, would basically have no clue which of the details were facts and which of them were the deluded nonsense of conspiracy theorists insisting it was little green men. They stoked that fire, because it just creates total confusion for the Russians as to what exactly the Americans were or weren't actually developing at their Area 51 base (which is just an aerospace R&D centre, in truth).

I'm sure, without doubt, the American government deliberately fuelled this fire of confusion and misdirection. Possibly even playing along with it all, feeding conspiracy theorists with "proof of aliens", so that they'd continue providing a useful distraction for them. And these "useful idiots" were completely genuine and convincing, as they really believed all this to be true, which makes discerning the actual truth - pulling the facts out of the fiction - still supremely difficult to do, even now, decades after-the-fact with many aspects now officially declassified.

But, simply, the USAF were experimenting with saucer-shaped craft - an idea that they got, just as with the V2 rockets, from the former Nazis, like Wernher von Braun, who were excused their involvements in WWII for providing their tech to the Americans (the V2 was successful technology, whereas the "Nazi saucers" - which it is known they experimented with - were an idea that wasn't) - and they were doing it at their R&D air force base, which was deliberately placed in a desert in the middle of nowhere to help keep their experiments top secret, so that Russian spies wouldn't know what they were up to.

One of the test flights went wrong and crashed in Roswell. Other test flights confounded drunk hicks, who had no idea what they were looking at, because everyone knows planes aren't saucer-shaped, came up with paranoid ideas about invading aliens that the Hollywood movies were promoting at the time (as basically a metaphor for the Russians having gotten to space first and that could conceivably mount an invasion from space - dropping bombs from orbiting satellites that, at the time, the Americans simply had nothing to counter - and so you get your sci-fi fears of "Space Invaders", and your "Body Snatchers" a metaphor for the fear that the spread of the ideology of Communism might "consume" the minds of Americans - which itself went crazy with later McCarthyism suspecting everyone and everything of its own paranoid delusions about the evils of "socialism" infecting people's minds).

Honestly, there's no big mystery here. No need for creepy music over footage of a failed hovercraft concept.

The chances of anything coming from space are far, far greater than a million to one, I say. And, still, they really ain't coming.

Because, you know, "space is big".

[kel]

christ, this is fast! :

[Firefox]

Didn't expect that!



Wonder what determines the "wavelength"?

[RedOktober]

Composition and thickness of the metal would be my guess.